Friday, 3 May 2013

KALQ – the keyboard of the future or an unnecessary QWERTY substitute?

In our fast paced society patience is apparently a dying
attribute, especially regarding technology. When it comes to loading,
connecting, updating and now even typing, the general consensus remains the
same: the quicker the better.

That’s why researchers at the Max Planck Institute for
Informatics have designed a new keyboard specifically created to speed up
typing on tablets. Currently, the common practice for typing on tablets is to
use two thumbs, a technique which is somewhat inefficient on the standard QWERTY
keyboard.

The KALQ keyboard (so called because the bottom four letters
to the right read K A L Q) has been designed around the conventional horizontal
grip adopted by a user typing on a tablet.The letters are split into a 4x4 grid on the left and a 4x3 grid on the
right which sit in the bottom corners of the screen. The aim is to minimise the
moving time of the thumbs and thereby reduce strain. Commonly used letters are
clustered together to reduce travel distance and to ensure that both hands work
equally. In theory, the KALQ design prevents long sequences from having to be
typed with one thumb by placing all the vowels in reach of the right hand and
assigning more keys to the left. For left hand users the layout can be
reversed. The hope is that eventually, experienced users should become so
proficient that they will be able to use their thumbs simultaneously.

While creatively thought out and well engineered, adapting
to the KALQ keyboard does require some effort, apparently taking eight hours
for QWERTY users to learn. This, coupled with the fact that Bluetooth keyboards
are a popular tablet accessory, prompts the question: is a KALQ keyboard
necessary? As much as it might improve onscreen typing on tablets, as long as
physical keyboards remain popular, it seems the KALQ keyboard may well be the
solution to a problem that doesn’t exist. Furthermore, one must question the
practicalities of using the KALQ keyboard for phones, tablets and other such
devices and the QWERTY for everything else. There is some doubt about whether all
users will be able to switch smoothly between the two.

We think it is probably better to be proficient at using a
universal keyboard rather than having an optimal layout for every single device
that makes use of a typing feature. We may not be able to type on a tablet as
quickly as at a computer, but at least we won’t be hunting for the letters
every time we switch machine.